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Thursday, March 30, 2017

Democrats: Party of Obstruction

Democrats: Party of Obstruction

Frontpage Mag - Thursday March 30, 2017

by Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Forget all the pages of the Democratic Party platform. The only real Democratic platform left is the one sung by Groucho Marx in Horse Feathers. “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

The elected Democrats still surviving amid the trendy restaurants of Adams Morgan and the boutiques of Dupont Circle are convinced that the voters elected them and that taxpayers are paying them to get nothing done.

Not one thing.

The ordinary leftist wearing a pink hat and clutching a Resistance sign either has no job or a government job. At the pinnacle of this pathetic movement sits the Democratic member of Congress making $174,000 a year, with Nancy Pelosi and Schumer taking home $193,000, and being paid to do nothing.

Around them circulate a vast network of staffers who are also being paid to do nothing constructive.

Taxpayers are on the hook for over $4 mil for the salaries of Senator Feinstein’s staffers. Schumer needed a $3.5 million staff even before he took power. Franken’s posturing requires a mere $2.8 million in staff salaries. It’s certainly a step up from 5 minutes with a comb on Saturday Night Live.

Alcee Hastings, threw a tantrum during the ObamaCare debate. "I don't have to be nice to nobody," he ranted. While Hastings was accusing Republicans of abusing poor people, the former impeached judge was carrying out his own charity work by paying his girlfriend $168,411 a year.

Taxpayers are spending a fortune to subsidize a corrupt bunch of clowns who spend all their time trying to bring down the government. The Democrats are not the opposition. Opposition parties oppose, but they also work for the common good. The Democrats only oppose for the sake of opposition. Their likeliest nominees burnish their presidential credentials by voting against everything.

The Democrats are not an opposition party, but an obstructionist party.

New presidents traditionally have a honeymoon period in which to assemble their administration and put forward an agenda. As David Horowitz has frequently pointed out, President Trump was denied any space in which to assemble an administration. Instead Democrats openly and covertly worked to prevent him from assembling an administration, let alone enacting an agenda.

The distinction is an important one.

Opposing parties can challenge an agenda. But preventing an administration from assembling a cabinet and putting its appointees into place is not opposition. When you set out to stop an administration from functioning, it’s government shutdown by deliberate sabotage. It brutally disregards the welfare of the country in a power struggle that damages the critical functions of government.

Crippling the government doesn’t just hurt Republicans. It means that critical agencies that should be fighting terrorism, dealing with international threats, maintaining crucial infrastructure and taking care of those who need help the most have been kneecapped by the partisan obstructionism of the Dems.

But obstructionists don’t care. Their goal isn’t to get anything done, but to get things undone.

The Democrats don’t see themselves as an opposition party. They’ve made that clear. Instead they’ve adopted the radical left’s mantra of “resistance”. Opposition and ruling parties can compromise. But a resistance cannot compromise with the enemy. Compromise is collaboration. It’s treason to the cause.

To call yourself the resistance is to define your objective as the obstruction and destruction of the enemy. And the enemy is President Donald J. Trump, the Republicans and all conservatives.

The Obstruction Party isn’t out to stop some things and get other things done the way that opposition parties usually do. It’s out to stop everything for the sake of stopping it. And that’s not how our system was ever meant to function. Our system of government was meant to mediate opposing views. It was not meant to allow a fractious faction to declare war on it from within under the false flag of procedure.

And so the system is breaking down. The civility of the Senate has imploded. And Democrats cheered this implosion using the hashtag #ShePersisted. The Senate was once the more civilized and reflective body. Now it’s churning with mediocrities aspiring to be the 2020 candidate while outdoing each other in bellicose obstructionism, manufacturing fake scandals and fighting every step of the way.

Once upon a time a commitment to mindlessly blocking everything the other party might do out of partisan spite would render a politician utterly unfit for higher office. But that is exactly what the leftist masters of today’s jackass party want from their Senate servants. Polls show that Democrats, unlike the rest of the country, want their representatives to sabotage and obstruct everything for the resistance.

And that is the dysfunctional mess that they are getting.

The Party of Obstruction claims that they are patriots. But trying to bring down the government under the pretext of the scandals you invented doesn’t make you a patriot. Patriots put their country first. Obstructionists put their agenda first. Ideologues put their ideology first. And that’s what leftists are.

Leftists aren’t loyal to America. They’re only loyal to the left.

The “resistance” isn’t motivated by patriotism. Patriotism is rooted in the idea of loyalty to a country. The leftists rioting in the streets and undermining the government from within are not loyal to any country. When Germany’s leader opens the doors to Muslim migrants, they hail her as the leader of the free world. If she closes the gates tomorrow, they’ll hail the leftist leaders of Canada or Venezuela.

When the Democrats allowed the left to take over, they put ideology over loyalty. The left led them into a treasonous allegiance to a foreign cause and insurrection against an elected government.

The Democrats never accepted their election defeat. They have rejected a peaceful transition of power. In their minds they weren't rejected by the people, but occupied by some vast shadowy conspiracy whose outlines mutate with every Maddow broadcast, New York Times tweet and Salon blog post. It is their duty to save their illegal alien transgender Muslim allies from Trump before he deports them to Alaska and destroys the planet by allowing coal miners and their families to earn a living.

Such lunatic reactions had always existed on the left, but they became mainstream within the Democratic Party when Bush beat Gore. After Trump beat Hillary, the elected leadership put aside governing to spend all its time obsessed with a twisted fantasy of reclaiming to the power they had held under Obama by forcing an elected president out of office.

The low intensity civil war waged by them has made governing difficult. But unlike authentic rebels, this civil war is being waged by entitled officials with six figure salaries against the will of the people.

An elementary qualifier for holding public office, like sitting in an airplane exit row, is a willingness to do the job. Taxpayers are not obligated to spend their hard-earned money on men and women who want to live out their resistance fantasies. That's what Soros is for.

If the Democrats want to obstruct the government, the first things that should be obstructed are their salaries.